Preparing for the Next Global Outbreak: A Guide to Planning from the Schoolhouse to the White House

Medical experts on the frontlines of the COVID-19 pandemic provide recommendations for governments, health agencies, and schools to prepare for the next outbreak.

Another pandemic is coming. The type, severity, and spread are unknown, but governments, public health agencies, schools, and all other organizations must be prepared in order to minimize damage and save lives. We need to identify the lessons learned from our successes and failures during the COVID-19 pandemic to plan better for our future response.

In Preparing for the Next Global Outbreak, David C. Pate, MD, JD, and Ted Epperly, MD, combine their decades of experience as doctors and health care leaders who have led their organizations through numerous public health challenges to create an extensive list of practical recommendations for a variety of organizations and agencies to better prepare for the next pandemic. They worked together in the fight against COVID-19 and the misinformation that devastated so many communities across the country. From the exam room to the public health board meeting room to the state capitol, Pate and Epperly use their expertise to craft 117 specific recommendations that organizations and governments can implement now in order to better prepare for the future. They divide these recommendations into checklists specific to different contexts: schools, hospitals, public health agencies, state governments, and the federal government. Public health officials, medical practitioners, state and local officials, school board members, disaster management leaders, and anyone with a stake in preparing their communities against future outbreaks will benefit from the recommendations Pate and Epperly outline.

This is the first book to apply lessons learned in real time during a pandemic while chronicling which responses did and did not work and why. The authors examine the global, national, and local responses to COVID-19 and illustrate how we can learn from the mistakes of this pandemic so as not to repeat them during the next.

David C. Pate, MD, JD (BOISE, ID), is a board-certified specialist in internal medicine and a health care attorney, retired from his prior role as president and CEO of St. Luke’s Health System. He has served as a member of the Governor’s Coronavirus Working Group in Idaho to advise on the public health issues associated with the COVID-19 pandemic.

Ted Epperly, MD (BOISE, ID), is a board-certified family medicine physician and the president and CEO of Full Circle Health. For 15 years he served as a member of the board for Central District Health, the largest public health department in the State of Idaho.